


to plant daisies in my throat

by Anonymous



Series: a feeling's not a thing you own [5]
Category: Sanders Sides (Web Series)
Genre: Depression, Disordered Eating, Gen, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-14
Updated: 2019-10-14
Packaged: 2020-12-16 10:04:16
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,698
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21034484
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Patton is dead.Virgil doesn't want to die.





	to plant daisies in my throat

**Author's Note:**

> hyeee!!!
> 
> content warnings, aside from the ones i keep saying over and over in this series, and even then, still some of them: suicide attempt, ambiguous ending (but not the end of the series!!!), everyone being sympathetic because They're All The Same Person Dang It (but roman's a little bit screwy), a forced bingeing episode, remus doing his thing, animal abuse in a metaphor

Virgil doesn’t feel the loss of Patton like he did the first time.

The first time was barely a feeling. It was more like a gradual numbing of the senses, as Patton kept sleeping in later and later, and how his smile seemed to fade, and how he never left his room, until the day he did, and he never came back.

There’s this allegory about a frog that sounds like something Remus would make up. Like, if you stick a frog in a pot of boiling water, it’s gonna jump out, because the water is hot, and it’s a sudden change from the frog’s normal temperature. However, if you put the frog in frog-temperature water, and slowly boil it, the frog won’t realise until it dies. Boiled alive when it thought it was taking a nice, warm swim.

That’s what Patton dying had felt like. He’d slowly changed everyone’s temperature until he was dead. This time, though, it was more like numbness than being boiled alive. Like he’s going to fall apart from frostbite.

The first time Patton had died, Virgil felt the absence like he’d feel the loss of Thomas’s legs, or lungs, or, more accurately, his heart.

The second time that Patton died, it had felt like his guts were falling out. He’d been standing in the stairwell, staring at Roman’s back and Patton’s wet, contorted face. He’d stayed silent and still as they’d cried at each other, and as Roman’s voice had pulled at his throat-

_“We need to die.”_

Virgil should have left right then, but out of fight or flight, he’d elected to freeze. Being a metaphysical construct of a human being, even in the Mindscape where he was created, he didn’t really need to breathe, so he simply… Didn’t. He didn’t think to, and if he had, he might have drawn attention to himself.

Then Roman had made some insinuations, and when he’d taken Patton’s hand, it was like there was a ripple in the air. A lightbulb flickering out. A theatre curtain dropping.

The second time that Patton had died, Virgil felt like his guts were falling out; it was like he’d been sliced open with a stupid katana, straight from the gap in his ribs, right under his sternum, to lodge into his pelvic bone. What came from the wound was fear, and anger, and cold shame. He’d just been pulled around by his stupid _feelings_ towards his centre’s Morality. He’d been manipulated by one of Princey’s puppets. It wasn’t Patton. It was a fucking lie; a construct made to mess with them.

And what’s this bullshit about them _needing to die_? Virgil’s getting enough of that shit from Remus, because everything’s so overwhelming that-

That both of the sides that hold the memories of Thomas’s emotions and his long-term dreams want to die.

Virgil reappears in Thomas’s living room, in the physical world that he fits into like a square peg in a round hole. In less strides than logically possible, he grabs Thomas by the wrist, from where he’s sitting on the couch and doing literally nothing else, except for basic bodily functions at rest. If he hadn’t considered Logic, he wouldn’t be wasting time on those thoughts.

“Come on,” he says, pulling Thomas to his feet. “You need to stop thinking.”

Thomas follows him like dead weight. You know what? Screw that phrase. Both of those words make Virgil feel even worse than before.

His feet lead them to the kitchen. With the thought of mindless chaos, he pulls Remus into the room, too. Both of them look confused as Virgil opens the freezer and pulls out a few pints of ice cream. They’re all stacked up on top of each other like traffic signals in Cherry Garcia, Peanut Butter, and Mint Chocolate Chip.

“Go wild, you two,” he gnarls. “Don’t even fucking stop to think.”

Thomas’s eyebrows draw up to crinkle his forehead, and his mouth falls open. His breath stinks almost as bad as Remus’s. “Virge, I don’t understand.”

“You don’t need to understand!” His voice layers over itself, echoing and drilling into Thomas’s brain. “You just need to do it. Don’t listen to any other thought. Do anything but think.”

Remus guides Thomas to a kitchen chair before looking at Virgil, himself. “What am I here for?”

Virgil runs a hand through his hair, pulling it out from his forehead and letting it flop down again. “If Roman comes in here, take him out.”

“With a morningstar?” Remus’s smile is only a few degrees away from unhinged this time.

“Sure,” sighs Virgil. “Whatever you need.”

He sinks away, searching for Logan, as Remus’s grin twists to be fully deranged.

* * *

And, well, okay. He wasn’t expecting _this_.

Scripting is a method of dealing with anxious thoughts regarding conversations. It’s especially effective on interactions with people doing their jobs, such as cashiers, and receptionists on the phone. It also kind of works with close friends, when there’s something you need to tell them, because you can kind of predict how they’ll react, and come up with how to respond to their response. It’s something that Logan introduced to him.

The thing is, scripts can be thrown off in various ways, and the whole coping mechanism falls apart completely. Someone can say something you didn’t expect, or you can trip over your words in a weird way.

Or Logan could be having a mental breakdown.

“Logan?”

Brown eyes lined in puffy red look up, and Logan says, “Virgil?”

“Yeah, it’s me,” Virgil replies.

He takes a look around Thomas’s bedroom. It looks like, well, Thomas’s room. There’s a bed, with unmade sheets that stink of sweat, with the only difference from usual being the presence of Logan perched on the end. Thomas’s phone is on the table of the side that Thomas usually sleeps on, plugged into the wall socket and charging. The open door to the bathroom shows that it’s surprisingly clean, even though the group of Thomas and his Sides only tackled downstairs during the mania of the past few days.

“What’s wrong?” they both ask at the same time.

Virgil shakes his head. No, this is urgent.

“Roman wants us all dead,” he tells Logan.

Logan nods. He replies, in that deadpan way of his, “I find that understandable.”

Virgil’s fingers curl. Every muscle in his hands that he can feel has tensed up.

“Understandable? Aren’t you going to, I don’t know, do something?” He flings his arms out, almost scratching Logan in the face. Logan doesn’t flinch. “We can’t let Thomas _die_!”

“Correct,” Logan says, nodding again. He adjusts his glasses, which had become askew at some point.

Virgil gestures again. “So! Why aren’t you doing anything?”

“Can’t Patton help?” asks Logan. “He is the embodiment of short-term goals and emotions, I believe.”

And all of the fight leaves his body. “Logan, Patton’s dead.”

“That’s ridiculous. He was in a comatose state in Thomas’s mind, then awoke five days ago. It makes no sense of him to have died.”

Virgil stares. Does Logan actually believe that? His face is just as unreadable as it always is when he’s reciting information.

“You’re not doing a good job, Deceit. Are you upset at losing your job?”

As if summoned by his name – who is Virgil kidding? Obviously he was – Deceit appears. His torn yellow sweatshirt is stained with a reddish-brown colour that Virgil does not want to think about right now.

Deceit covers it by folding his arms over his torso, hiding most of the damage from view. “You called, bitch?”

Logan blinks. “I don’t understand.”

“Patton, he wasn’t real.” The words leave Virgil in a rush, and, when he pauses to breathe, Logan interrupts.

“Who are we talking about? And don’t call me Patton.”

Virgil could tear his hair out. The lack of specifics as to which _“he”_ he means is intentional, make no mistake.

“The Patton that woke up and walked around for the past week-”

“Five days.”

“Ugh! Five days!” Virgil shrugs. It doesn’t fully communicate his frustration. “He wasn’t real. Roman made him up.”

Logan blinks. “I… Don’t understand.”

Virgil is now actually going to tear his hair out, if anything makes him tug on his hair harder than he already is.

“I’m afraid that’s a falsehood, Logan,” Deceit interrupts. His voice isn’t as slimy as usual. Well, he hasn’t been slimy for a while. “You understand completely, or, at the very least, enough to comprehend the goings-on of Thomas’s mind. You’ve known something was up with Patton this entire time.”

There’s a soft sigh, and Logan shakes his head. “I do not wish to acknowledge that.”

“But you have to.” Deceit’s voice is gentle. A little honey seeps into the way that he speaks, but not enough to make Virgil’s stomach coil with sickly sweetness. It’s just like Mary Poppins said. A spoonful of sugar to make the medicine go down, or whatever. “You cannot delude yourself like this. It’s simply not logical.”

Logan’s smile is so clearly forced that he almost looks like the fake Patton. “I wish it was.”

“Trust me,” says the embodiment of Thomas’s capability of deception, to himself and to others. “It isn’t.”

“Roman wants Thomas dead, Logan,” Virgil grits out. “That’s also a thing that is happening.”

“Yeah, about that.” Deceit raises his index finger. Sticky blood stains his sleeve, where it was pressed against his torso. “Isn’t it great how you’re also not doing your job of protecting Thomas right now?”

Virgil responds to that by gesturing to Logan.

“Where is Thomas?” Logan asks. “Couldn’t Roman have gotten to him?”

His hair flops around his face as Virgil shakes his head. “I’d’ve felt it.”

“I believe that entirely,” says Deceit. “You totally didn’t leave our centre completely abandoned.”

“Yeah, no, I didn’t!” Virgil gestures with splayed palms.

“Then where is he?”

That makes Virgil freeze. “With Remus. In the kitchen.”

Logan stands up at that and begins to pace the part of the room that is not taken up by the bed or the piled clothes on the floor that probably don’t fit anymore.

“You might have well just put a bunch of ice cream in front of them and tell them to dig in!” he exclaims. “This whole crying thing is what happened the last time you let them lose control over their eating schedule!”

Though Virgil doesn’t speak, Deceit murmurs, “You _didn’t_.”

His shoulders begin to shake, hunching up as if he could hide his hot cheeks. “I needed them to think about something else. Don’t tell me that you haven’t heard Remus screaming about his suicidal impulses. He’s been given a task that takes up all of his brainpower.”

“It uses all of _Thomas’s_ brainpower!” Logan gestures at his own body. “Obviously, your distraction fell short!”

Deceit’s arms have fallen from his chest, showing the scab through the split of his sweatshirt. The three of them look at each other with the same three pairs of brown eyes.

“_Shit_.”

* * *

Virgil rises up in an empty kitchen. Two pints of Ben and Jerry’s lie finished on the table, while the off-brand mint is still mostly full and also melted.

He spins around. A puddle of blood lies on the floor behind Thomas’s chair, congealing into the same brown on Deceit’s sweatshirt.

Virgil can’t help it. He screams.

Thomas is dead. Thomas is missing, and Roman is feeling murderous and-or suicidal, since those are kind of the same thing in this situation, so Thomas is obviously dead. Virgil has failed. Virgil has failed, and now he’s going to die, and, somehow, in some stupidly relieving way, _he does not want to die_.

But Thomas is dead, so he won’t be far behind.

He can’t breathe. This is the end of the story. He’s just going to rot and fade to nothingness, and nothing will ever get better.

“Virgil! _Virgil_!”

He blinks. Blocky frames, a smudge of blue…

“Patton?”

“No, I’m sorry,” says the voice. “It’s Logan. Listen to me, Virgil.”

Patton is dead. Patton’s dead, and he won’t ever come back to life, and Virgil can also die, because Patton died, and if any side was supposed to be immortal, it would be Patton.

“Thomas is fine. Thomas is fine. Your plan worked, no matter how hasty it was. Thomas is with Remus, on the couch. He’s alive. He’s as okay as he can be.”

Something gently tugs Virgil to his feet – he’d fallen? – and guides him towards a soft seat that he’s pushed down into, and the smell of a dumpster truck on fire.

“Lovely to see you, Virge!”

That voice?

“Duke?”

Something wet swirls around Virgil’s ear, before a very close voice murmurs, “You know it, babe.”

Familiar disgust coils in Virgil’s stomach. As his vision comes back into focus, he looks to see Roman’s unconscious body trussed up in scarily well-done shibari, and Deceit watching over him. Logan watches all of them, standing in his normal place beside the stairs, and, to Virgil’s left, Remus straddles Thomas, who kind of does look a bit dead.

Roman’s voice creaks out a weak, “Please, just put us out of our misery.”

“Appeal to vanity,” says Logan. “Remus, corpse facts, if you will.”

If he focuses incredibly hard, Virgil can maintain annoying music in both Thomas’s and his own head, which eliminates the majority of corpse facts that Remus gleefully recites, until Roman falls asleep and the Duke returns his attentions to Thomas.

“You good there?” Virgil asks.

Thomas slowly raises a shaky thumbs up as Remus makes disturbing sounds around Thomas’s throat.

There’s nothing really to argue. Slowly, they all cuddle up against each other, with Remus spreading across everyone’s laps like a very long cat. Virgil places his head on Thomas’s chest. The awkward position is worth hearing and feeling the soft thuds of his centre’s heartbeat.

* * *

Virgil wakes to find his head in someone’s lap. Their thighs are soft, like a pillow, and like Virgil’s own legs, and everyone else’s. His face is being warmed by sunbeams through the cracks in the blinds, which someone must have opened to let the light in.

The best part is that Virgil doesn’t really feel like himself.

When he stretches, it’s subconscious. He nudges the stomach of whoever he’s using as a pillow with the back of his head, and definitely wakes them up with an involuntary mewling noise which pushes out from his chest. He shifts onto his stomach, and rises with an amount of effort that he is not even aware of.

Virgil opens his eyes a crack when he hears the person next to him hum. It’s such a noncommittal noise; it could be any of them. It turns out that it’s Logan, who is also stretching now. He’s rolling his shoulders and twisting his neck. Virgil mirrors him slightly, working out the muscles that settled wrong overnight.

As he does, he glances around the room in an effort to start fulfilling his actual functions. Deceit is curled up into a little ball in the corner of the sofa. Remus is stretched out on the floor.

The ropes that held Roman are knotted, still, as they were, but Roman is nowhere to be found.

* * *

“So, uh.”

Thomas laughs. He hopes the sound isn’t too bitter.

“This is where I’d normally start with _what’s up_, or whatever, but…”

He mirrors Roman’s shrug, looking at the Side behind his phone.

“This is just a quick thing to kind of… Tell everyone that they’re really great.”

He points at the camera.

“Yeah, that means you! Nuh-uh, yeah, it’s you! I love you! You’re doing great!”

Then it’s as if he deflates. He slumps over, looking at the camera with a dryly fake smile.

“I can’t keep this up. It’s not really anybody’s fault. I guess I should tell you all that this video has content warnings for discussions of suicide, since, well… That’s what…”

He’s looked away at some point, to stare at the hands in his lap. Before he speaks again, though, he raises his head to look at the camera. This is his last confession. The first of his final rites, performed by none other than Roman.

“It’s what I’m planning on doing.”

Thomas swallows. Again, he looks to Roman, and his encouraging, gentle smile. He looks at him – both of them; both of them look at each other – with such love in his eyes. Is this what it felt like before?

“I know that this isn’t really something that you’d all expect from me, but it’s something that’s been coming for a while. I’ve wanted to do this for what feels like a lifetime, and, if I don’t take the leap now, when will I?”

There’s nothing funny about it, really, but he snorts with laughter anyway. He rubs his face and looks back at the camera.

“Maybe I’d feel better if I hadn’t pushed my friends away, or if I didn’t lie about how I’m actually feeling. That was… Probably a mistake. But, the thing is, I don’t actually feel much of anything, and, when I do, it’s just feeling ashamed, or disgusted at myself. And, you know. That’s no way to live. My meds make me feel worse, I have no motivation… It’s why I haven’t made any new videos recently. And that kind of leaves my friends out of jobs, too, because I was conceited enough to put myself in the centre of everything, so now my issues are fucking up everyone else’s…”

He blinks, cutting off his heated monologue.

“I swore. Fuck it, I’m not editing this. I just need to do this sooner rather than later. I can’t keep everyone waiting on my own inability to sort my shit out.”

He looks up to smile at the camera. Though his breaths are thick, like he’s drowning in treacle, his eyes are as dry as the painkillers that he has in the bathroom.

His next words, though he speaks them to the camera, are addressed to the people he sees in his mind’s eye. Camden, Quil, Terrence, Dahlia, Valerie, Talyn, Joan, and so many others. His parents. His brothers. Every boy he’d loved. So many people who touched Thomas’s pathetic three decades on earth, and who he must have affected in some way, no matter how little or how much.

“I’m too much of a coward to say this to your faces. I’m sorry that you had to be affected by my death, and I’m sorry that you loved me. I wish that I could make this hurt less for you, but sometimes, these things just have to happen. I’m selfish, you know? And I can’t keep on living.”

At the end, when he speaks, Thomas almost sounds like himself.

“I’m sorry. I guess, take it easy, guys, gals, and non-binary pals.”

Roman stops recording as Thomas smiles softly, waving his hands across his face and out in gentle muscle memory.

While Roman uploads a video to Thomas’s channel through the Youtube app, Thomas fills a glass with water from the tap and does battle with the childproof lid of the pill bottles.

Then, cradled in his Creativity’s arms, leaning against the bathtub, he lets himself fall asleep.

* * *

Four pairs of footsteps pound up the stairs. Virgil stabilises himself with his hands just in front of his face, scrambling like an animal to reach Thomas’s bedroom door. He gets there just after Logan twists the doorknob open, slamming the door against the wall.

The room is just as disgusting as always, but it looks like Thomas at least made an effort to clear up the clothes on his floor. They’re on his bed, now, anyway. Still dirty, still stinky as hell, but hey! at least there’s less of a tripping hazard!

Thomas’s phone is on top of the pile. Logan picks it up and unlocks it to make a call.

Through the roaring in his ears, Virgil hears a humming voice. Remus and Ethan both jostle past, entering the bathroom before stopping still. Virgil follows the sound of Roman’s voice, murmuring out the words to _A Dream is a Wish Your Heart Makes_ in a gentle slur.

It’s a sickening pieta. Remus has already fallen to his knees. He reaches out to Thomas, or maybe Roman, or maybe just to the only shape he could see, because a moment later, he drops to the floor in what Virgil is too pessimistic to hope is sleep.

“I’m Thomas, in a manner of speaking,” Logan’s saying into the phone. “Yes, Joan. How far away are you?”

Ethan hangs onto the side of the sink to keep himself balanced. At least, Virgil guesses so. He holds the guy by the sleeves of his sweatshirt, just in case.

“Roman, couldn’t you have done anything else?” Ethan groans out. His voice is weaker than Virgil had ever heard it before.

In response, all Roman does is sing a little louder. At some point, the melody transforms into _Someday My Prince Will Come_. As Ethan starts to sink away, Roman misses a note, and holds Thomas a little tighter.

“I don’t know if we have very long,” says Logan. Virgil looks up, but, yeah, he’s still on the phone. “I’m afraid that he’s already unconscious. I fear that he will choke on his own tongue, or his vomit. I don’t know how I’m still here.”

Something thuds to the floor. Virgil turns to find himself the only person in the bathroom, save for Thomas himself, whose head has been miraculously protected by a bathmat. Or, well, Virgil hopes so. The world isn’t exactly real, right now.

Well, it is real, because Virgil can reach out and touch Thomas’s hair. He can shift the guy to lie on his side instead of his back, and to make sure that his mouth is open and his tongue is not in danger of falling back the wrong way.

But everything feels a bit laggy, and the outlines of the world copy over each other like a Windows XP window being dragged around the screen. Tiles are cold. Thomas’s cheek is soft.

Virgil is-

**Author's Note:**

> arealsword drew!!! actual!!!!!! [art!!!!!!!!!](https://ibb.co/gjnKjWD) for the last scene!!! i'm dead. just look at those colours!!!!!!!!! look at their little faces!!!!!! BEHOLD IT


End file.
